Heat and Fur Just Don’t Go Together Well.

It’s bloody hot again. I have to be careful making statements like that in Oh Canada.You could get in real trouble. There is an unwritten law here that you are never, ever to complain about the heat. In the winter, you can do all the whining you want to but once the warmer weather hits, you are supposed to just shut up and enjoy it. But I can’t. When it gets to be in the 90 degrees territory with what seems like an equally high number in the humidity department, I just stop functioning. I have no energy, no brain power, no creativity, no will power to quit drinking so much wine and no ambition to finish the draft of the Mediterranean Journey Cookbook. I can’t sleep properly hence I walk around with a foggy brain that has a hard time focusing on anything except my grumpy complaints about the heat.

I’ve always been like this. I remember those hot, humid summer days in Columbus. I would stand on the back porch and watch the heat waves wafting up from the too-hot-for-bare-feet sidewalks. I always wanted to test the old adage that it was hot enough to fry an egg on that same sidewalk. I never did it mainly because my mom would have been very upset at my wasting food. We, obviously, didn’t have air conditioning back in the dark ages of the 1950s. Did anyone? People would just get through the day and in the evening head outside where it was moderately cooler than the inside. But, at some point, you had to go upstairs to sleep. But sleep I did not do. Instead, I’d lay awake late into the night convinced that it was hot enough inside that house to start a fire. The heat fuelled my too active imagination.

To add to the general malaise of this day, Rose, my usual complaining cat, ups the ante and becomes irritatingly grouchy. From early in the morning, she follows me around meowing in a most unpleasant manner to remind me that she’s carrying body full of hair and it’s bloody awful. I have explained to her umpteen times that, while I am a powerful woman, I do not have anything to do with the temperature. She, obviously, totally ignores me.I should know by now that if there’s anything that causes her the least, teeny tiniest bit of discomfort, she’s going to blame me.

Her brother just chills when it gets hot. After breakfast, he disappears to the coolest oasis he can find to sleep his day away — quietly, I should add. Not my Rose, oh no, her plan is to make me suffer as much or more than she is. She is not subtle in her complaining. Today she parked herself in the middle of the dining room table while I was having my breakfast. I mentioned to her that I didn’t really want to have to stare at her privates while I was eating. “Tough Titties,” her body language shouted at me.

She was upset because here it was 9 a.m. and I hadn’t turned on the air conditioner yet. I don’t try to explain to her that I really dislike the air conditioning, and anyway, I was going to be gone for the next couple of hours so why squander my money by turning it on? “Selfish, selfish, selfish,” she meowed at me as she gave me a withering stare.

When I came home, she was still on the table grumbling about not getting even 10 minutes of her 18 hours of daily beauty sleep that she needs. I finally relented, mainly because the long walk home from brunch wiped me out completely. I certainly did not say that to Rose. She watched me as I climbed the stairs to turn the air on. By the time I got back downstairs, she had moved to her regular daytime sleeping perch on the back of the couch. Needless to say, there was not a thank you to be heard from her meowing self as she slipped off to sleep.

I just checked the forecast for the next week. They promise, after a scorcher for tomorrow, that we will get a reprieve from this heat. I won’t get Rose’s hopes up in case they’re wrong … again.

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